After repeated revisions, constant court fights and shifting science, the Fish and Wildlife Service presented a plan that addresses a range of threats to the owl, including some that few imagined when it was listed as a threatened species in 1990.
The newer threats include climate change and the arrival of a formidable feathered competitor, the barred owl, in the soaring old-growth evergreens of Washington, Oregon and California where spotted owls nest and hunt.
One experiment included in the plan: shooting hundreds of barred owls to see whether that helps spotted owls recover.
Even after all these years since the spotted owl became the cause célèbre of the environmental movement, it is far from clear that the plan is a solution. Advocates on both sides say it will inevitably be challenged, and both sides have expressed frustration with the Obama administration on the issue.
Some contentious points have still not been addressed, including precisely mapping the so-called critical habitat to be protected. And some experts say that while two decades of protections for the owl have helped preserve forest ecosystems, they are less certain that the bird itself can still be saved.
The spotted owl is declining by an average of 3 percent per year across its range. While some populations in Southern Oregon and Northern California are more stable, some of the steepest rates of decline are here in Washington. Some study areas in the Olympic and Cascade ranges show annual declines as high as 9 percent.
“I’ve certainly become much less confident as the years have gone by,” said Eric Forsman, a research biologist with the United States Forest Service in Corvallis, Ore., whose work in the 1970s first drew attention to the owl. “If you’d asked me in 1975, ‘Can we fix this problem?’, I’d have said, ‘Oh yeah, this problem will go away.’?”
The listing of the spotted owl as a threatened species led to a virtual ban on logging in many older federal forests, inspiring angry lawsuits and threats of violence by rural loggers against owl advocates, who often came from urban areas.
“We were trained not to tell people in the local towns that we were surveying spotted owls,” said Paula Swedeen, a government owl surveyor in the early 1990s who now works for a nonprofit group that develops incentives for private forest owners to retain and restore owl habitat.
Yet over time, the public passion and the owl both faded.
Even as unemployment in some timber counties routinely rises into double digits, there are no longer presidential Timber Conferences, like the one Bill Clinton held in Oregon in 1993 seeking middle ground between conservation and protecting rural economies. Many factors contribute to rural declines, but logging restrictions played a role.
“Nothing against the bird, but it’s wreaked a lot of havoc in the Pacific Northwest for the past 20 years,” said Ray Wilkeson, president of the Oregon Forest Industries Council, which represents loggers, sawmills and others in the industry. “A lot of human suffering has resulted from this. Now there’s new threats to the owl that may be beyond anybody’s ability to control.”
The barred owl, a bigger, more adaptable bird with a broader diet than the flying squirrels and the wood rats that spotted owls prefer, has expanded its range westward in the past century, and it is now a more common resident than spotted owls in many Northwest forests. Sometimes barred owls even kill male spotted owls and mate with females.
“The barred owl is the most imminent challenge,” said Paul Henson, the Fish and Wildlife Service’s team leader for the recovery plan. “We believe there is a very good chance of recovering the spotted owl in the long term if we can manage the barred owl issue in the short term.”
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